SHAC Doesn’t Learn Their Lesson

Some of you may remember this post from a while back. In it, I detailed the activities of Stop Huntington Animal Cruelty (SHAC), a group dedicated to shutting down Huntington Laboratories. The labs in question conduct research involving animals, and SHAC maintains that these experiments cause great suffering to the creatures involved. One of SHAC’s more notorious tactics has been the posting of the personal information of Huntington’s employees on their website. They also target the employees of any company that does business with SHAC, right down to the people who mop their floors. This has resulted in some real harm being done to the targeted people, including threats and vandalism. SHAC of course maintains that they are only exercising their first amendment rights by posting this information, and claim ignorance of any harassment that results. Thankfully, the courts didn’t see it that way. They held that SHAC’s activities crossed the line from political protest to terroristic threats, and sentenced six of the persons who maintained SHAC’s website to federal prison terms. As might be expected, SHAC is still defiant, with the convicted persons trying desperately to portray themselves as first amendment martyrs to the leftist press. SHAC has also pressed on with its campaign of harassment, recently publishing the personal information of persons who work for Huntington’s accounting firm. Hopefully, the convicted members of SHAC will soon have some company in the federal prison system.

Left Behind: Eternal Forces Fails to Live Up To Expectations

I was so looking forward to experiencing a bit of evil fun with the release of the PC game title Left Behind: Eternal Forces. Based on the popular book series of the same name, the game depicts the war between the forces of good and evil that occurs during the end times as prophesized in the Book of Revelations. It is highly unusual for a Christian-themed PC game to depict bloodletting of any kind, let alone the full-scale slaughter described as happening during the tribulation. In a pre-release report, The Southern Poverty Law Center claimed that the game “invites players to roam the simulated streets of New York on a quest to kill ‘non-believers’, including Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and gays.” The game’s producers also said that in the online version players could take on the role of the general of hell’s armies, commanding legions of heavy metal rockers, secularist college students, and U.N. troops. Now what cynical non-believer (such as myself) wouldn’t take the up most joy in getting online and challenging some holy roller to a game of Armageddon, commanding satanic armies as they annihilated the forces of righteousness and burned every cathedral in sight? Unfortunately according to both published reviews and Amazon’s feedback page, the game fails to live up to its initial promise. There in fact appears to be little killing involved, as the players spend most of their time trying to peacefully convert citizens to their line of thinking. The game play is also (as might be expected) crude and unimaginative, with some reviewers comparing it unfavorably to freeware games. And, to top it all off, the game is apparently riddled with bugs, making it difficult to get through a compete mission without the whole thing crashing. Oh well, I guess I’ll have to live out my fantasies of satanic jihad elsewhere for the time being.

Extreme Politics Goes On Vacation

I’ll be out of town this week, so there’ll be no post for the coming weekend. Check back next week.

Jews For Hitler

File this one under news of the weird. This enlightening article describes the growing problem of neo-Nazi skinhead activity in Israel. Most of the young people involved are recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union who possess only a small amount of Jewish ancestry. They are often rejected by other Israelis due to their predominantly non-Jewish blood as well as their inability to speak Hebrew. Focusing their rage on the ultra-conservative Hasidic Jews who they feel are most representative of their persecution, these pseudo-Nazis vandalize Jewish houses of worship and cemeteries, as well as run anti-Semitic websites. They members of this neo-Nazi underground obviously view Judaism to be a religion and a culture rather than an ethnic group, and so do not see themselves as being truly Jewish just because they have perhaps a single Jewish grandparent. Many of them state a desire to return to the former USSR where they can be back among their fellow gentiles. It is of course highly unlikely that neo-Nazis in other parts of the world would accept these persons as legitimate national socialists, given their mixed ethnicity. They might be better off staying where they are, playing the role of the Nazi bogyman to a shocked Israeli population, rather than go back home and be reminded that they are, in the eyes of their fellow white power skinheads, Jewish.